Not a whole lot going on as of late. Things have been pretty slow at the cafe, but we have been bring some serious force to bear down on the insurgents of Fallujah. They've been retaliating with mortars out by my location, but so far they've done nothing more than stir up the fish. They were at it again before 5 this morning in fact. These people have no consideration for those that may be sleeping. I'll guess we'll just send some of the boys around to rough 'em up a little.
During the slow time, I went outside and fixed up some things around the place. Some of our camie netting was falling over, so I fixed that up in a more permanent fashion (driving stakes into a brick wall was interesting). After that, I was standing around with my hatchet looking for something to do, so I decided to go ahead and do something about the dilapidated cardboard box that has been serving as our bike's basket for over a month now. So I went to our wood scrappile and busted apart an old pallet, pulled nails out, cut boards here and there with the hatchet or brute force (as the situation dictated), and began assembling a new basket.

Before I got too far, I realized that I would only have enough useable wood for the base and 3 sides of a 4-sided box. So I thought about it a bit and made the 3-sided box.... big enough to hold the cardboard box. So now, I have the wooden box bungee-corded to our bike somewhat (but not quite) permanetly, and the cardboard box can be taken in and out of the wooden box. One bonus I wasn't planning on is the fact that the plywood on the wooden box sort naturally curls inwards, sort of gripping the cardboard box inside.

Now, if only I can get Cpl. Obringer to draw a new flower on the front of this new, improved, bicycle basket (not available in stores)>

Well, it's been a while since my last update, so here goes. We have had all sorts of connectivity problems here. A crossover cable went bad (intermittenly bad), shutting down internet access. On the phone side, our modem went bad (slowly degrading over time), and then, we got hit by a virus on the computer side and segovia shut us off. These things happen I suppose, but when it all goes on within a weeks time, it tends to be very fustrating. Since then, I've replaced the crossover cable, removed the defective modem (awaiting replacement), and re-partitioned/ghosted all of the computers to have very limited security policies and antivirus installed. Now, internet is back up and as soon as the modem gets here, we'll have phones again.

On another note, I am actively recommending the mp3 player "billy" as a replacement for winamp on windows systems. It is very lightweight (less than 1mb in size), and can read in huge playlists of songs in a split second, and has an easy to learn interface. Basically, I was getting sick of how winamp bogs down when I put in a cd with over 600 songs in it. I tried ultraplayer with even worse results. Upon reading in the filelist from the cd, it crashes about 300 times with visualbasic errors. Media Player never likes mp3s with compressed idv3 tags, and has a bad enough time reading 622 songs as it is. But then, I found billy. Billy installs and runs as a green diamond in your taskbar. You open it up, choose the menu item "add folder" and select the cd drive and in a split second, your list is there. Then, I usually shuffle the list and hit play. No sweat. Granted this program doesn't have the best playlist editor. Granted, it doesn't read in idv3 tags, but that doesn't seem to bother too many people.
On another note, I wasn't too impressed with natty, the email checker. It may just be my system, but when I click on "add" it freezes and blinks on me.

Well, I have finally fixed the photo album so that I may upload new pictures. Then, after fixing it, I dedided to go ahead and upgrade from 1.2.1-p1 to 1.4.4-pl2. It has a lot new features (that I may never need), but it changed some of my template files, so the colors are all different now, plus you don't get the links at the top. It seems to have the ability to have headers and embedd itself into webapps, so I may be able to get this fixed in a different way then before. For those of you who use rss readers, there is an rss link you can use on the bottom of each page of the gallery. This is in-line with my goal of making sqbnet xml based with an rss feed. For those of you who have no clue what xml, rss, and headers are, don't worry. The pictures are all there, and stay tuned for more pictures coming soon!

OIF II pictures are uploaded! Check them out!

I just got news (well, a day or two ago) that a former co-worker and good friend fell ill while on vacation. At the hospital, he was diagnosed with Leukemia. A day later, he went into a coma. Within a day or two, he was taken off of life support and died. The whole thing from feeling sick to death took place within a few days. Mark Strozzi, you will be missed.

Very small update: The time changed in Iraq. So now, they are GMT+2 instead of GMT+3. So, noon in PA is 8pm here.

I finally got to get ahold of Danielle last night. The last several times I've called her, I've always just missed her. The one time, she was at the fair, the next time she was working a 16-hour shift (and where she works, she's not really allowed on the phone), the day after that I had just missed her leaving the house. However, I called at 1240am our time and got her as she was getting to the house. Well, the first time I missed her because my phone cut out, but the second time, I got her. It was very good to talk to her after all this time. She was doing good... somewhat upset over a test that she had studied for and flunked. I feel bad for her because I know she works really hard at her studies. She'll get a chance to retake it, but I think it kind of gave her some self-doubt. Anyways, her dad had apparently turned the oven on with a pan in it that had a plastic handle. She discovered this and pulled it out and ran water on it. When her dad came in, she told him about it in all seriousness, and I heard his reply "That's a darn shame" in a not so serious tone. I'm pretty darn sure I like this guy, and I don't even know him. I just like his laid-back reactions to things. She told me about the time that I knocked her into a fence at Hershey Park and he's like "good job". Anyways, I've come to learn that Danielle doesn't know about stone soup. This has shocked and amazed me. I asked if she had been home-schooled, and she asked if I was insulting her. So I asked if she thought home-schooling was worse than public school, and she said no, but thought I was saying that. Well it turns out that neither of us look down on home-schooling, and in fact, she isn't home-schooled. So, I am in even more shock that she doesn't know about stone soup. How could society fail her in this way? I gave her a mission to find out about stone soup. BTW, this whole stone soup fiasco (as it's being called in popular media) came as a result of what we know how to cook, which came as a result of the pan in the oven. I had stated that I would never have that problem of turning the oven on with a plastic pan in it. Why? Because I don't use an oven unless it has the word "microwave" or "toaster" in front of it. So, to make a long story longer, I somehow am now required to cook her a meal that isn't a noodle when I get home. No problem. Popcorn's a meal, right?

Cheers!

Well, I've been at the internet cafe for 5 days now and things are working out pretty good. I got a helper, and we worked it out where he takes the morning shift (5am-10pm) and I take the "evening" shift (8am-midnight) so we both get a decent amount of sleep and both of are covering during the busy times of the day. Some other good news is that I did my laundry and pulled out a fresh set of camies from the ol' seabag. I spent a couple hours arranging my gear. Now all my clean clothes are accessible from the footlocker and everything else is in the bags. Gee, I know this must sound really exciting to all of you tuning in at home. Well, in truth the job isn't the most exciting one. I had my excitement last year, and while if they wanted me to get some more this year I would, I don't mind sitting this one out. I do hear the "exciting" stories. However, they aren't actually exciting so much as they are troubling. A buddy of mine got hit by an IED and fortunately only a bit of it hit his arm. He's fine and will be back out on the road in a few days. I appreciate everyone's prayers for me and my unit, and I ask everyone to please keep it up. I know I will continue to pray for the rest of my unit and other servicemembers out here.

For all ya people keeping track... I got it! I have just moved into the internet cafe in Iraq and will be running it for the next 7 months. Now if you'll excuse me, I have more skating to do. :}

Well, all worked out well. We got into the air field on the 14th, and made our way into Fallujah by the 16th. They have decent internet access here, but the actuall facilities are crowded. Basically, everything is overcrowded with the number of Marines living here and all the generators are overloaded, meaning we can't run all the "niceties", but otherwise the base is pretty nice.